TRADE unionists are sceptical about proposals for a single organisation to provide health services including out of hours GP services, community health, mental health, and hospital services.
Unison reps say they have been informed by Lesley Smith, chief officer at the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) - which commissions the town’s health services - about plans to restructure health services in Barnsley.
They say the CCG wants a single organisation, rather than a partnership of current NHS providers. They claim it will do this through a tendering process in the autumn with new arrangements for community and mental health services starting by April 2020.
A Unison spokesman said: “If this goes ahead it will completely reverse the changes that joined Barnsley’s community and mental health services up with SWYPFT in 2011.
“We believe this risks privatisation, but whatever the outcome will lead to 18 months of managers looking to the future of their own jobs and arguments about structures, rather than the existing organisations working together and focussing on improving services for the people of Barnsley.”
Unison’s South West Yorkshire Partnership health branch, which represents almost 1,000 people in Barnsley, is sceptical and a spokesman said there would be a huge impact on staff.
“Support staff are a key part of the NHS team and we will be fighting to make sure anyone transferring does so to an NHS organisation and not to a subsidiary company.
“Since Barnsley services became part of SWYPFT in 2011 everything has been integrated and several large departments such as payroll and recruitment are now based in Barnsley.
“Although SWYPFT was a large trust before taking on Barnsley services and should remain viable without them, there will be a massive task sorting out the jobs in the various headquarters support functions: there is a real risk of redundancies among these staff groups.”
A spokesman for the CCG said the future of health and care in Barnsley was to create a integrated, joined-up health and care system where people experience continuity of care and see familiar faces, not organisational boundaries.
“Barnsley CCG is right at the start of a process, together with health and care partner organisations across Barnsley, of considering how integration of services could be taken further in order to improve health services for patients and citizens. There is a proposal that this could best be achieved by bringing services together under one integrated care organisation. Our work is about exploring whether bringing teams together is better for Barnsley patients and staff and it is not about cutting costs or threatening jobs. This proposal is in an early stage of development and the CCG will be engaging and consulting on how this might work.
“The statement from Unison, partly informed by information that we have already shared with them, makes a range of broad assumptions that at this stage really are too early to be stated as facts, or even possibilities. The CCG has already committed to working with union representatives on this proposal in an open and transparent way.”
